People often ask us about the name of the company: why “Creative” Learning? Being a very good question, it doesn’t have a simple answer.
One reason for the name is to distinguish our method of learning (using Learning Styles) from “traditional” learning (traditional learning takes place in a brightly lit classroom, with the teacher at the blackboard and the pupils uncomfortable on hard chairs).
"Creative learning" also means: be creative when you learn, use learning tools to help you, have fun.
Some examples (and there are literally thousands) of learning using the Creative Learning approach include:
· making and using specific learning tools like electro-boards, flip chutes, wrap-arounds,
· playing a board game with a child to teach them to count,
· playing a board game with a child to teach them to recognise at a glance the visual patterns made by the dots on dice,
· becoming detectives for the day and taking a walk through the neighbourhood to find all the numbers "3" on the houses - great for kinesthetic children,
· making a gigantic letter A from cardboard, then cutting it up into jigsaw style pieces and putting it back together again (to teach the alphabet) - great for tactile children,
· playing bank or post office (using official forms) to practice writing / adding up,
· playing FlySwat to teach a foreign language: you write the vocabulary on the black board, give 2 children a fly swat each, then you call out a word and the first child to find the translation on the board gets to swat it - again, good kinesthetic fun.
What else can a teacher do, apart from finding out their own Teaching Style and their pupils’ Learning Styles (available from www.creativelearningcentre.com)?
· At the end of each lesson, let kinesthetic children throw a ball around or hit a balloon to one another as you call out one thing you remember from the lesson,
· For a geography lesson: let visual children paint and write a postcard from a pretend-holiday describing typical weather of that month, tourist attractions, cuisine, industry, farming,
· For a geography lesson: let kinesthetic children set up a drama play about their experience as tourists in a foreign country,
· For a geography lesson: let tactile children build a topographic map of the region using coloured clay.
Still stuck for ideas? Then please email me on yvonne@clc.co.nz and let me know the age group and the school subject you’re targeting, and we can brainstorm together.
Alternatively, please leave a comment on this blog.
I look forward to hearing from you.
2 comments:
hy my name is Monique I have a 12 years sun who doesn´t like to read and he needs it because he doesn´t read well. What can I do Thanks
Dear Monique
First of all, you are not alone in your dilemma. Many children, particularly boys, don't seem to enjoy books nowadays. This is partly because boys often prefer non-fiction over fiction, and partly because TV and computers offer a distraction from the printed word.
So, the first thing to do in your case is identify _why_ your boy doesn't like to read.
Does he enjoy stories when he sees them on TV or hears them (read or told by you)?
If he does, then the problem is simply that his reading ability is standing in the way of enjoying a story from a book, and improving his reading skill will change all that.
If he's not interested in stories of any form, then perhaps he would warm up to a non-fiction book? Try to take a few of those out of the library: something about ships or cars, perhaps, another one about an exotic holiday destination, a book about animals... whatever his interests are.
In very rare cases, dislike for books may signal that a child is dyslexic and not able to follow the sequence of events on the story.
Another possibility is that your son is strongly tactile and/or kinesthetic, with a non-preference for visual and auditory input. If that's the case, you need to engage him in reading using special methods designed for kinesthetic and tactile children. (To assess your child's sensory preferences, you can purchase an LSA Junior from www.creativelearningcentre.com.)
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